The Politics of Erasure in constructing "normal human life"

How does an agency, charity, or society depict “normal human life” to serve their means? How are their means framed artistically and otherwise in order to farcically project a sense of “fairness?” In a system defined by externalities, a discussion of semiology and materiality can offer several useful insights into these contingencies of “Otherness” – particularly when comparing the feminist struggle for agency in crafting the female narrative, with the degrading depictions of the 'disabled' in early United Way advertisements. Our very conception of the agents in question, however, is thoroughly complicated by such a comparison. In different societal contexts, agency is participatory in different ways and but most often relies on the erasure of individual experience in order to define normalcy for the in-group.

The liberalism denoted by the Classical Greek idea of “collective agency” can at first be deceiving. Collectivism practiced in sharing economies generally aims to create a system of fairness, but as Karlyn Campbell notes in “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” this kind of agency, as practiced in ancient Greek culture, is undiscriminating and inherently prone to change, thus obfuscating the identities of the agents in question.

This particular case illustrates the reciprocal nature of agency, as the agency of a Greek male citizen was contingent on slavery and the subjugation of women – in order to serve the “common good.” Though it was the ‘accepted truths’ constructed by these men that oppressed women and slaves, they too were bound to them, but with a false sense of nobility.  Classical Greek agency defers to the “beliefs that either constituted common sense or were accepted as true because of the … ‘excellences’… of those who demonstrated prowess,” as a unifying principle for the agent. “An agent,” she writes, “literally was a representative of their community,” rather than an independent actor. In this sense, collective agency suggests a system of inequality where agency is not synonymous with power or autonomy. Agency, for Greek subject-positions, came at the cost of self-sacrifice. For the oppressive ruling citizen class, agency came at the cost of “sacrificing” these classes of people. In either case, it is “communal and participatory” (Campbell 3).

The aforementioned kind of noble “fairness” supposed by some modern notions of collectivism applies far more the United Way in their capitalistic drive for “charity” for the disabled. Barton argues that disability reflects “a dynamic set of representations that are deeply embedded in historical and cultural contexts.” Using the rise of United Way in the 1950’s, an era of post-war conformity, paranoia, and growing affluence (often framed as an agent of the “common good”/goodwill) is more than appropriate to this understanding, considering the amount of xenophobia, repression, and greed that the post-war era saw.

The relationship between United Way’s depictions of the disabled and biographical depictions of women share the reductive yet “effective” tendency toward erasure seen in Dana Gage’s fictive rendering of Sojourner Truth’s speech at the woman’s rights convention in Akron. Just as Gage altered the Dutch dialect in Truth’s speech to a more southern, perhaps marketable and stereotypical one, United Way reduces and erases the complex, vast experiences of the disabled to a constructed subordination. In either case, a constructed audience is at play (Ong 10). In order to create an “identity” for the disabled or black abolitionist women, an audience must be assumed, and the same goes for United Way advertisements. This is perhaps no better illustrated than in an advertisement depicting the silhouette of a man, with his face and identity obscured, and the caption “The toughest handicap for a retarded child is that he becomes a retarded adult (Barton 179). This faceless, silhouette is erasure in a physical sense, but goes a step further. The advertisement capitalizes on the fears of the able-bodied that they too may become disabled. Using the deeply-rooted cultural association of mental disabilities with infantile dependency and difficulty, and positioning the audience as subject to the breakdown of mental faculties associated with infancy, the United Way ad stokes the fears of its constructed audience, based on predisposed assumptions that are being reinforced. This does not entail a total destruction of these vast, multitudinous experiences of the disabled, but there is certainly a replacement. The creation of a sympathetic, generous, fearful, able-bodied audience is not an “erasure” of whatever their own predispositions and experiences might be, but it is essential to the erasure of individuality in the disabled. The able-bodied audience’s conception of itself and the disabled are interdependent. Their “normalcy” is based on the othering of the disabled, and the “disabled-ness” of the disabled is contingent upon the self-perception of the able-bodied audience, which is fed this script through fear tactics and their own construction as an audience.

Barton, Ellen L. “Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way.” Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and         Culture. Ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale:            Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 169-199

Barton, Ellen L. “Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way.” Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and         Culture. Ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale:            Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 169-199

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.